Semiotic capitalism based on signs is being funded through greedy investors who only exploit individuals for their intellectual property and economic benefits.

However, when academic labor succumbs to the capitalist logic of productivity and is viewed as a cost factor, educational and scientific activity itself is reduced to a cost in business. In fact, today, the universities resort to compromising the capacity for creating sustainable conditions for research and education, in order to reduce the costs. While striving to increase student enrollment, they opt to reduce tenured positions, and refuse to allow time and provide funding to research projects that are not likely to fetch immediate material returns. The main objective here is to provide “service” to the highest possible number of students with the lowest possible number of permanent instructors. The concerns about the qualitative content of the lectures or the hampering of extracurricular research activities of the instructors are outside of the scope of the capitalist teaching factory’s agenda. In this sense, the prevalent logic in to- day’s academic institutions is becoming increasingly contradictory to the logic of scientific production.¶ The simultaneous commodification of knowledge and labor thus threatens the foundations of their reproduction. The precarization of the knowledge- producing labor force is both a result of this commodification drive and a cata- lyst that accelerates the erosion of knowledge as raw material.17¶ The increasing casualization of academic labor started to draw attention as early as mid-1990s. Already in 1994, Lessinger and Wojcicka-Sharff had compared the growing adjunctification of faculty to the working conditions in a “sweatshop” (Lessinger & Wojcicka-Sharff 1994). But it was mainly in the 2000s that precarious academic work came into the spotlight of sociological research.¶ The effects of neoliberalism on knowledge production have been mostly discussed with regard to the “corporatization of the university”, the privatiza- tion of higher education, the neoliberal view on students as customers, and the drawing of scientific production into the orbit of profit incentives.18 In the re- cent years, concepts like “academic managerialism” (Winter 2009; Kolsaker 2008; Deem & Brehony 2005) or “academic capitalism” (Slaughter & Rhoades 2004) have been coined to refer to the increasingly business-like and entrepre- neurial character of the academic profession in the knowledge economy. The critical discourse on the effects of neoliberalism on higher education is often being accompanied by an ironic usage of metaphors like “academic assembly line” and “academic production line” (Barry et al. 2002; Parker & Jary 1995 cited in Ninnes & Helstén 2005: 186). The Marxian “sausage factory”-analogy for universities is already worn-out by now in the stylistic sense but more actual¶ 17 In his article, in which he discusses the merits and limits of Polanyi’s “fictitious commodi- ties”, Bob Jessop provides a different approach to the commodification of knowledge. He focuses on the question of how knowledge in knowledge-based economy is being trans- formed into capital through intellectual property, and how this results in monetary capital accumulation. According to Jessop, capital appropriates the socially produced collective body of knowledge inherited from the previous generations, and, by turning it into intellectual property, realizes the primitive capital accumulation. Then it manipulates intellectual and manual labor via intellectual technology. The knowledge output yields profits and spreads, but as soon as it spreads, its value starts to decrease – as a result of market competition. According to Jessop, from capital’s point of view, this is the “self- defeating character of the information revolution” (Jessop in Buğra & Ağartan 2007: 115– 134). Jessop’s thesis can be read as an adaptation of the classical Marxian concept of the “tendency of the profit rates to fall” to information capitalism.¶ 18 The rise of the knowledge economy played a crucial role in the “hooking” of education into the orbit of capital accumulation. Already in 2000, Neil Smith wrote that “the educa- tion ‘sector’ represented a $700 billion investment opportunity” (Smith 2000: 331).¶ EBSCOhost - printed on 7/1/2024 5:18 PM via UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use¶ Situating the Issue of Displaced Academics 35¶ than ever with respect to content as shown in the previous section (cf. Smith 2000).¶ It is argued that, in neoliberal times, not only scientific research is being increasingly dominated by business interests of third-party funders,19 but also higher education itself comes to be seen as a pre-work training program. Con- sidering the “symbiotic relationship” between the universities and the institutions of power for the last 500 years and the increased pressures for narrower specialization in the 20th century, it can be argued, rightly, that “the advance- ment and transmission of knowledge for its own sake” has always been some- what “an ideal of intellectual autonomy which has never actually existed in- stitutionally in its pure form” (Brienza 2016: 94–95, cf. Clark 2006). However, with the progressive withdrawal of direct state funding from the mid-1970s onwards, the universities became brutally susceptible to market pressures due to their increased dependence on external funding. Academic institutions and degree programs that refuse or fail to cope with the priorities set by business metrics are now considered to be outdated, while some scholars suggest reforms to make the university more “marketable” or “market-smart” (Breton & Lambert 2003; Zemsky, Wegner, Massy 2005). The drive to subordinate the sphere of production to the fluctuations of market demand imposes itself fervently upon the academic production relations.20 The compulsion with which this happens steadily undermines the academics’ capacity to maintain a more or less non-utilitarian attitude toward knowledge accumulation. Ulrich Beck once said that the hitherto existing forms of social organization such as fam- ily, class, neighborhood and alike are becoming “zombie categories” (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 203). One might argue, that the institutional structures of academia as a site for the production and dissemination of knowledge and critical thinking seem to follow suit.21